It’s hard to believe that L.A. Unified wasn’t already testing all students for giftedness, but it wasn’t. And it looks as if that resulted in certain poor and heavily minority schools having virtually no students identified as “gifted.”

The L.A. Times reports that the district’s new superintendent is requiring every second grade student be tested, starting this year. This is huge. It sounds as if he actually believes in the concept of intellectual giftedness, and cares about programs that support it.

Across the district, white students — 8.4% of L.A. Unified’s enrollment — make up about 23% of those designated as gifted. And Asians — 3.6% of the district — make up 16.4% of the district’s gifted students.

Most students come to be tested through one of two routes: A parent requests it or the school takes the initiative. And one or both haven’t been happening at many schools like 99th Street, which is 75% Latino and 25% black.

Part of the reason, said L.A. schools Supt. Ramon C. Cortines, is “insidious racism.” But another crucial factor in Los Angeles, he said, is that programs for gifted students have long been associated with integration efforts. Getting the “gifted” label made middle-class whites and Asians eligible for special programs designed as incentives for them to remain in public school.

Cortines, who came to the district in 2008, wants to identify as gifted at least 6% of students at every school. Administrators began targeting some schools, an effort that quickly saw results. The number of black students identified as gifted increased more than 9% over a six-month period.

Maybe “insidious racism” is a factor, but I suspect the administration at the schools in question is not mostly white or Asian. I suspect the main reason gifted minorities get overlooked is that they are in poor, low-achieving schools, and most educators in those schools don’t want to bother identifying gifted students and giving them special attention. There’s no incentive for them to do so. On the other hand, if they don’t get enough low-achieving students up to the minimum testing standards, they run the risk of having the feds take over the school.

School districts get no extra dollars for identifying higher numbers of gifted students. Instead, the state allots funding for the gifted based on district enrollment. For L.A. Unified, that allotment has been shrinking, to about $4.6 million this year. Most of that has gone to IQ testing, administrative costs and training for teachers. About $25 per gifted student has gone to schools, officials said.

The ongoing budget crisis actually created a disincentive for finding gifted students. As partial compensation for cutting school funding, the state allowed districts to use the gifted-student money for any purpose.

Another reason is that many educators think there’s something unsavory about identifying the intellectually gifted. They think it’s elitist, maybe even racist. That’s because as we in this blogosphere know, kids from poor families and kids from certain minority groups get lower scores on intelligence tests and aptitude tests, as a group. So to be fair and sensitive, we’re supposed to say those tests don’t matter — at least we say that when we’re dealing with those groups. Clearly the educational establishment acts differently toward the middle-class schools full of white and Asian kids.

Meanwhile, society continues to make important decisions based upon those tests, such as whom to admit to college. And some of the intelligent individuals from those groups will get shafted, because they were always lumped in with everyone else from the group.

Plus let’s face it: Some people just find the gifted annoying. They don’t want more of them around. It’s a lot more acceptable to say, “Intelligence tests are racist and elitist,” than to say, “I just can’t stand eggheads.”

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Here’s a post by “Audacious Epigone on the estimated IQ of teachers. It’s not high — about 107 for K-8. So at least according to this, the average teacher would not be considered intellectually “gifted.”

I read a study recently, to which I can’t find a link now, that the lower-scoring members of the teaching professions are the ones most likely to teach at the poor schools. So if the teachers themselves aren’t gifted, how eager are they going to be to identify a subset of their students as being smarter than they themselves are?

Europe is moving to prevent customers from getting a shock with their mobile bill. People do a moderate amount of surfing and suddenly find themselves with whopping bills. As some of you may recall, AT&T did me a solid by waving a hefty data charge if I signed up for the data plan. It’s better when things can be solved this way rather than through legislation, though I don’t find this law objectionable in spirit. I particularly like that people are allowed to set their own limits.

File this away under “things that should have been thought about at some point before or immediately following getting on this road.”

A fascinating article from The New Scientist about the “Women and children first” ethos. Apparently, whether these cultural norms are honored can depend on whether the ship sinks fast or slow. Of course, this looks at older cases. No telling how that would work out today.

Could the cure to peanut allergies be to feed them peanuts earlier?

I read things like this and come away amazed that the early innovators didn’t patent the mouse and other obvious things.

A list of ideas on what we can do about the airline seat problem, discussed here on HC previously. Numbers 6 and 7 sound familiar. Meanwhile, Continental Airlines is joining many others in charging more for front and exit-row seats. On the one hand, getting those seats has been a godsend and thanks to Clancy’s diligence we’ve been able to do so without paying more and that’s coming to an end. So… boo. On the other hand, I said during that previous conversation that I would be willing to pay more for more space.

Another Slate article on the precarious anonymity of sperm donors. If the idea is “the best interest of the child” and children not conceived and not born do not count, it’s difficult to argue that anonymity should remain in tact for the convenience of the father and so that sperm would be widely available for women that want to conceive solo (or have infertile husbands). Even so, this falls under limitations on the best interest of the child in my view.

According to the ISPs and other folks, Net Neutrality is a threat to future Internet service because as the networks get bogged down there won’t be any way to distinguish between valuable and non-valuable transmissions. According to Silicon Alley, we’re going to hit major bandwidth shortages sooner rather than later on cell phone networks. If true, will this provide an opening for service differentiation on cell phones that can then be ported to regular Internet?

Nobody cleans their fridge anymore and the fridge-makers are trying to compensate.

There are concerns that recidivism rates will climb as ex-cons are unable to find work in the current economy. It’s better if they can find work on getting out, though I have to admit that they are a lower priority than the others. There is an argument, I suppose, that they should be made a higher priority because they’re more likely to misbehave if unemployed, but on a visceral level alone getting people to the front of the line because they committed crimes is just a no-go.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, less women (or men, for that matter) majoring in stupid studies is a good thing. On the other hand, before we get too carried away trying to get women into geek careers, how about we find jobs for the men already there?

It’s not easy to make a whole lot of sense of this. Of the various things I had to offer in a relationship, knowing my way around technology was not among them. Nor did it seem was my reluctance to shave as often as my facial hair declares I should. Nor my extra poundage.

Eye halve a spelling chequer
It came with my pea sea
It plainly marques four my revue
Miss steaks eye kin knot sea.

Eye strike a key and type a word
And weight four it two say
Weather eye am wrong oar write
It shows me strait a weigh.

As soon as a mist ache is maid
It nose bee fore two long
And eye can put the error rite
Its rare lea ever wrong.

Eye have run this poem threw it
I am shore your pleased two no
Its letter perfect awl the weigh
My chequer tolled me sew.

— Community poem based on the original Candidate for a Pullet Surprise, by Mark Eckman and Jerrold Zar.

The incoming admissions staff at the University of Waterloo have a problem with what they are seeing from their prospective students. Articles like these have been fairly common in the past fifteen years or so, and a backlash against some of the worst methods of teaching (especially the “whole language” nonsense and the idea of “open plan” schools) is slowly taking root.

Too little, too late? Can this be turned around? Working in my department at SoTech, where we “educate” the next generation of teachers, I am occasionally frightened by what I see. It is an open secret that our students are an average of 20 IQ points lower than the IQ of the next lowest-performing college. Our professors regularly give grades of B, or even A, to projects that would have been given a failing mark when I was in the fourth grade. One required test for the students, supposedly meant to ensure that the curricula for a grade-school position have been memorized to a sufficent degree, is passed by students “brute-forcing it”. To wit, they repeat the test some dozen times or more (there is no limit on how many attempts one may have, save that it may only be taken once per day and costs a set fee per attempt at the SoTech Testing Center), entering in random answers to multiple-choice questions until they eke out a “passing” grade once. “Prole Twang”, as Sheila would call it, abounds not only in hallway conversations but in classroom presentations. In the case of two african-american professors (who oddly enough carry bachelors’ degrees in “african-american studies”), it is actively encouraged.

It has been said that “Those who can, do. Those who can’t, teach.” The more time I examine the fields of teaching, and the more time I see the students passing through these doors, the more frightened I become that this could be true. It is a statement that many would take to be rude and demeaning. There are many good teachers employed in the world. At the same time, there are any number of people who entered the field of teaching because they believed it to be easy. There are a large number who entered the field because they lacked the mental acuity for other professions. Sadly, since “promotion” in the field of teaching is largely about being given older students (kindergarten/preeschool teachers are “promoted” to 1st/2nd grade, 1st/2nd grade teachers “promoted” to 3rd/4th grade, and so on) and the system mostly revolves around the idea of “tenure”, by which a teacher who has been in a system for a number of years can either be promoted or not, but never fired, the field has worked itself into the situation we have today: a large number of people expected to educate middle-school or high-school children about more advanced grammatical, mathematical, or higher reasoning concepts are the very people who repeatedly proved their inability to grasp the very same concepts throughout their own educational career.

It is one thing to have a teacher who cannot understand basic geometry, but can still teach a kindergartener how to count to twelve. It is quite another to find out that, fifteen years later, this same teacher is now somehow teaching a trigonometry class because they have, through the magic of seniority and tenure, managed to “fail upwards” to teaching the ninth or tenth grade.

Once upon a time, there was a post here. This post was written a year ago, when it was standard procedure to forward-date posts. Unfortunately, the post was forgotten about and one year later, up it went while I was out watching a movie. Oops. It was never supposed to go up. Sorry for the confusion.

Not the most dynamic of videos, but nonetheless a fun cover of one of my many favorite They Might Be Giants songs.

-{The following was written a couple months ago and apparently fell through the cracks}-

The commute terrors continue. On Thursday my morning drive to work alone took three for no discernible reason. I have discovered that if I leave early enough I can sidestep that. “Early enough” can be defined as sometime between 5am (wherein there was no traffic) and 7am (wherein there is much). I’ve been pondering whether or not to start going in to get there at 7, spending two hours in the cafeteria novel-writing, and then working from 9-6. I’ve also determined that since Friday morning traffic is not generally as bad, if I were to come in early on Mondays and work a couple extra hours and come in late every Thursday I could keep the horrendous traffic down to two days a week (and inconsistent Fridays).

One thing that I have not really considered is public transportation.

The main reason for that is that there is no direct route from Soundview, where I live, to Enterprise City, where I work. In order to take the bus, I’d have to drive to a Soundview Park’n’Ride, take a bus to Zaulem, then hop buses to Enterprise. On a good day, that alone would take me two hours. It’s not hard to imagine days where I miss the connect and it takes considerably longer. The upshot would be that I could spend my time doing something other than driving. But that’s about the only upshot and right now audiobooks are keeping me somewhat entertained.

Historically, I would love to take public transportation to work. When I had jury duty in Colosse I had a bus pass and it was awesome. I drove to the PnR in Mayne, got on the bus, and got off near the County Courthouse. To anyone that lives in the suburbs and works in downtown, it’s absolutely great. What a lot of boosters of public transportation don’t realize, though, is that that’s actually only rarely the case. Newer cities are not generally built cleanly around the downtown/suburb model that many people imagine and may see in their own Historic cities. Had they been built around public transportation from the outset, public transportation would likely make a lot more sense for a lot more people and it’s quite likely that we would all be better off. Even with that admission, though, the facts on the ground don’t particularly support public transportation in most cities. The main reason being is that only a fraction of a city’s workforce typically works downtown except in very few metropolitan hubs. Instead you see more things like my current situation where you’re driving from one part of a metro area to another and everybody is driving too and from separate parts.

I frankly have difficulty seeing a more robust public transportation changing that. The industrial parks have already been built. Housing patterns have already been established. It’s possible that in rapidly growing smaller cities like Boise or Reno that they could make a dent, but not in cities that have downtown areas that are simply too small to support the bulk of the city’s workforce. Colosse has an economically robust downtown area in the daytime, and maybe if the incentives were in place more taller skyscrapers would be built, but never enough to keep up, really. You could set up alternate downtowns and the Colosse has done just that, but not enough to justify direct public transportation in many case and the only places for further growth are in the suburbs, which makes it so that public transportation is only supportable from that half or quadrant of the city.

On the other hand, if the goal is to get more cars off the road, it does seem to me that there are cases such as Soundview to New City to Enterprise might be a good idea even if not economically profitable. That’s certainly a case where a not-insignificant number of people would likely take advantage. I think that the biggest problem at the moment is that any such bus route would involve the same Splinterstate that I deal with day in and day out where the HOV lane often gets just as backed up as everything else and for it to work you would need constant back-and-forth which is probably not supportable by the current commuting population. What Cascadia (in concert with my employer, Mindstorm) has instead done is double-down on Vanpooling.

The basic idea behind Vanpooling is that if you can get enough people, the Cascadia Metropolitan Transit Authority (CMTA) will spot you the vehicle and Mindstorm will give you primo parking. I’ve thought about going this route, but the problem with that arrangement is that you lack flexibility. You have to all go and leave at the same time, and in a dynamic work environment like Mindstorm and really most every job I’ve ever held, that’s not realistic. You don’t always know when you leave in the morning what time you’re leaving for home at night. With regular bus service this isn’t a problem because you can just take the next bus, but when you’ve only got one ride home that’s a problem.

What I guess would be ideal would be some sort of system where enough people could pool in together in order to have one bus arrive at 8, one at 9, and one at 10 and then leave at 5, 6, and 7 respectively. That’s a lot of cats to herd.

Colosse County has a setup called “early voting”, designed to try to relieve pressure at the polls so that there aren’t 7-8 hour lines on election day. Basically, for ~2 weeks before the election, people are allowed to show up at any “early voting” location in the county (regardless of their normal voting precinct), present their voter ID, and the ballot for their registered precinct will come up for them. This allows people to vote on their lunch break, coming home from work, or anywhere else that fits their schedule.

Unfortunately, when the Colosse County Voters’ Registration Office screws up, it screws up royally. Supposedly there is a little-known “loophole” in Colosse law that states that if someone moves, but their voter registration isn’t moved with them, they can show up at the polls, sign a change-of-address form… and then vote (legally) on the old ballot despite not meeting the residency requirements. Unfortunately, whoever wrote the signage at the polling places did not know of this loophole, and put in very large letters dire warnings about trying to vote for a race in a location you do not currently live in.

The inept, incompetent CCVRO has not honored of any the change of addresses I have mailed them in the past five years and thus mailed my official voter registration card for this year to an address I used to live at five years ago, approximately 40 miles from my current home.

And so, when I went to vote today, I found that my right to vote in local elections had essentially been stolen by the incompetence of the CCRVO… and I have no legal recourse on the matter. I considered voting in the races specific to my old precinct, but I couldn’t (despite REALLY hating the guts of one of the congressional candidates) do that in good conscience; instead, I voted only in the races I was sure that (by my current residency) I was actually, legally and morally, allowed to vote in. Three libertarian votes, one Democrat vote and a vote for an unaligned county judge later… I was out, my vote essentially meaningless in everything except the judges’ race and the one Democrat vote.

And that is how the Colosse County Voter Registration Office stole from me my right to vote. My one bit of solace comes from the fact that my Democrat vote was a vote to fire (with reasonable hope of victory) the utterly incompetent CC Tax Assessor / Voter Registrar Peter Wageringdocket.

MSN offers up a “10 things” list – they erroneously tagged a “10 Commandments” list on the link I found it at – on “how to lose weight.”

It’s an interesting collection of “conventional wisdom”, some of which are correct and some of which aren’t.

My Webmaster and I were discussing some of the differences between working in the private sector and the public sector. He works for Southern Tech University while I’ve worked mostly in the private sector. My father, on the other hand, worked in accounting for the Department of Defense, so I’m well aware of the differences in incentives between working for the government and working for a profit-making entity. He’s written a post on his experiences and I’m going to write a post on mine.

Before starting my current job at Soyokaze America, I did work with a temp agency whose only client was the State of Estacado. I only took one job there that lasted a couple of weeks, but in that time I happened to be privy to a whole lot of government waste.

The job involved moving the Child Protective Services (CPS) from one building to another building. The entire move was actually an example of said waste. According to Estacado State Law, the government cannot lease a building for more than two years uninterrupted. While they could invest in buying some property, instead what they do for a number of agencies is have them relocate every two years. This is a very expensive and time-consuming process that really doesn’t serve anyone.

I’m not sure there is enough money in the world that could adequately pay those that are taking the calls for the CPS. They listen to one horror story after another. Unlike social workers, they don’t even get the satisfaction of building a relationship with those calling for help. Instead they file a report and pass it on and likely never hear from them again. As it stands, these folks start at about $25k/yr. It’s good pay for a phone job, but it’s the stuff nightmares are made of.

So our job was to move the phone bank as well as the rest of the agency over to a similarly sized building a few blocks away. This involved moving a whole lot of computer equipment, which is where I came in. My job was to take the computers down, box them up, and then set them up at the new place. Easy enough. It was also to box up the stuff from the warehouse, which is where I really got the education experience.

They had hundreds and hundreds of copies of Microsoft Streets & Maps 2006, all unopened. Sometimes in the private as well as the public sector this sort of thing happens and I would have been understanding of, except that they also had hundreds and hundreds of copies of Microsoft Streets & Maps 2005, all unopened. They had half that many from 2004. Why would they keep buying software that they’re obviously not using? The answer, of course, was that it was in the budget and if they said they didn’t need it, they wouldn’t get it. It seemed to me that if they were worried about expending their budget that money would be better spent on the call-takers, but that fell into a different category and besides the money was clearly marked for that specific software package.

The other oddity involved inventory. I would be hard to fault the state for having so many extra sets of speakers. They come with the computers but rules and regulations prevent the employees from having them on their computers. Fair enough. The only problem with this is that if they get rid of the speakers within two years, the retail cost of the speakers is deducted from their budget even though they really couldn’t buy the computers without them. The idea behind this was to “cut down on waste”, which is a laudible goal but one they are only sporadically concerned with and only, it seems, in the least applicable circumstances.

They they waste warehouse space maintaining speaker inventory that they don’t need. Each box had a date on it. Anything before that date was to be disposed of and anything after that date had to be shipped to the new location, where it would wait for a while and then be disposed of.

You might ask yourself (I know I would be), “What does he mean by ‘disposed of’?”

There is a Goodwill not six blocks from the complex that they were moving out of that they could give it to. They could sell the stuff on eBay. They could raffle them to their employees for a job well done and put the money raised towards an office party or something. Actually, no, they can’t do any of that. Instead they post excess inventory for 90 days and then give it away to anyone that calls dibs. Most of the speakers ended up going to a company that turned around and made a profit selling them boxed and in mint condition. State money was spent helping them load up.

A lot of the other (non-boxed, non-mint) stuff was thrown out. There were monitors galore that were literally left at the curbside. They actually put a sign on it that said “Do not take” so that someone would assume that they were good and would steal them. I myself got away with five sets of 3-part speakers and three laptop satchels.

Good for me, not so good for the State of Estacado and its taxpayers.